Of all the organizations campaigning to protect our online rights and freedoms, Fight for the Future (FFTF) could well be the loudest (and most viral).

But fightfortheftr, as its name is
sometimes styled,
isn’t all bark and no bite. The organization
gets things done.
The group’s
internet blackout campaign,
which was the biggest online protest ever, proved instrumental in the
defeat of two Congress bills
targeting internet privacy and freedom.

If you’re going to get involved with online activism, check out Fight for the Future. Here’s our profile with everything you need to know.

The fight for a free internet began in 2011

Fight for the Future was founded in 2011 by Tiffiniy Cheng and Holmes Wilson. The pair also created the political transparency website
OpenCongress
and open-source media player Miro.

Fight for the Future’s
goal
is to “build tech-enhanced campaigns that resonate with millions of people, enabling them to consolidate their power and
win historic changes thought to be impossible.”
It’s a nonprofit organization based in Massachusetts, USA.

Mobilizing the internet with cat signals

Since 2011, Fight for the Future has made a serious impact with its major
campaigns against threats to online privacy and internet freedoms.
It has taken on NSA surveillance, the Trans-Pacific Partnership’s
censorship threat,
net neutrality, and online privacy issues.

To fight the bills, Fight for the Future organized an
internet blackout,
which took place on January 18, 2012.
It was the biggest online protest in history.
Ten million people signed the petition and over eight million of them attempted to phone Congress.
For the blackout itself, more than 115,000 websites blocked their content to
simulate an internet damaged by censorship.
Many of the world’s biggest websites took part, including Google, Wikipedia, and Reddit. As a result,
almost a billion people were blocked on the internet
for the day.

The campaign was a success.
Neither SOPA or PIPA was passed into law.

Pressing the “reset” button on privacy: #ResetTheNet

After Edward Snowden’s
mass surveillance revelations
in 2013, Fight for the Future had a big response for the NSA too.

The NSA is “twisting the internet we love into something it was never meant to be,” said FFTF’s
Reset the Net
campaign. “We can't stop targeted attacks, but we *can* stop mass surveillance, by building proven security into the everyday internet.”

The campaign involved thousands of websites, people, and apps. The aim was to change the way people used the internet by issuing a
Privacy Pack
of proven security tools. Then, on June 5, 2014, everyone would “reset the net” by using these tools to make their internet more secure—and a
new era of online privacy
would begin.

Reset the Net was championed by Google, Reddit, Twitter, and other big sites. The Privacy Pack, created with the assistance of the
Electronic Frontier Foundation
(EFF), remains a valuable resource to this day.

The internet slowdown to protect net neutrality

Fight for the Future rose to the occasion again in 2014, when several American ISPs
threatened our right to communicate freely online.

In the U.S., the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) protects net neutrality with a law called the Communications Act, which demands that ISPs transmit all websites at the same speed.

But in 2012, big American ISPs like AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon tried to change the law so they could
introduce internet “slow lanes”
for internet subscribers unwilling to pay fees for faster speeds.

Fight for the Future retaliated with the
Internet Slowdown,
another mass protest that showed what the internet would be like without net neutrality.
More than two million people took action
on September 10, 2014. Websites such as Netflix, Etsy, Kickstarter, and Urban Dictionary participated by displaying alerts with the “loading” symbol (aka the “spinning wheel of death”) to symbolize using the internet in a “slow lane.” These alerts encouraged users to contact the FCC, Congress, and the White House.

It worked. As of 2016, net neutrality is still safe.

The battle rocks on

In 2016, Fight for the Future worked with former Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello and Firebrand Records to stage
Rock Against the TPP,
a concert tour whose aim was to raise awareness about and mobilize people to stop the TPP.

Fight for the Future’s high-profile campaigns are just the tip of the iceberg. The organization has done an incredible amount of work to protect the internet in recent years.

Without free speech online,
many important voices would be silenced.
We’d have a lot less fun on the internet, too.

Hopefully, the closest we’ll ever come to a censored internet is one of Fight for the Future’s viral blackout protests.